A debate night for Vance to remember and for Walz to forget

It’s not always easy to tell who wins a political debate. Sometimes performances need time for people to process them and have key moments emerge that connect with American voters. And sometimes you witness a debate performance so dominant, so one-sided, that one party in the spin room is left arguing more out of hope than belief that debates just don’t matter. 

Tonight was one of those nights for Democrats — and this one wasn’t even close. J.D. Vance was smooth, empathetic and emphasized his life experience with hardship and poverty. Tim Walz was nervous and unsteady from the opening question and didn’t seem to find his footing until more than an hour into the debate. He botched answers to obvious questions, not just tougher issues like his falsehoods about his past travels to China, but even questions phrased as softballs on climate, guns and migrants. He called himself a knucklehead and said he’d befriended school shooters. This was, for a relative unknown on the stage, a performance that veered from disastrous — he sounded particularly out of touch on border and immigration issues, which only happen to the most or second most important issue according to voters — to just unprepared.

Reifying his status as an MSNBC dad, Walz’s only strong moments of the night came on issues that the cable news channel hammers away on every hour: abortion and a final round on January 6. On the first point, he repeatedly lied about the nature of the law he signed in Minnesota, which is perhaps the most extreme abortion law in the country (he also lied by omission about the much-politicized cause of death of Amber Thurman, a tragedy of medical malpractice that could’ve been avoided). And on the second, whatever the strength of his response, it came on an issue that motivates Democrat partisans and the media but doesn’t even rank in the top ten for most Americans.

Democrats have to be seriously disappointed in a performance where the likes of CNN’s Jake Tapper and Abby Phillips declared it a clear win for J.D. Vance, and questioned how prepared Walz was for the moment. More than one journalist and commentator speculated that Vance’s choice to do any interview, anywhere, anytime over the past several months had served to prepare him for the stage where Walz’s repeated dodging of even friendly interviewers had left him lacking the reps you need for a nationally televised game. When MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace is reduced to accusing Vance of “mansplaining,” you know it’s time for desperate spin.

For Vance, the real challenge was to connect with the audience and make the case for Trump without getting too wonky or seeming too distant from commonly held concerns. He needed to be the hillbilly made good, not an intellectual policy tech bro. He absolutely achieved this for most of the night, and visually projected a confidence and ease with the facts that Walz, who spent most of his time bent over scribbling during answers, obviously lacked.

The moderators made very odd choices throughout the night. There were no questions about Ukraine, about China policy, about lessons learned from Covid, about school choice, about the longshoreman strike — and their decision to mute Vance’s mic early on in the midst of a healthy, polite debate about immigration seemed aggressive and disruptive. The long-winded questions took up more time than they should, and they regularly disrupted back and forths between the candidates that were perfectly civil by forcing a new and often less interesting topic. Again, this should be the last cycle that Republicans participate in any major network debates — after the ABC and CBS performances, it’s clear these hosts just aren’t cut out for managing debates without inserting their own views and stepping all over the candidates Americans want to hear from.

This moment is why Trump picked Vance in the first place — to win the debates with the media and prosecute the case against Kamala Harris in the debate. He proved thoroughly capable of handling both tonight, and Walz proved a much less impressive debater than anyone could’ve imagined. How much it matters is an open question, but in a cycle that became so chaotic, it is hard to think it will matter less than other vice-presidential debates of the past — and it could matter a lot more in stalling the momentum of the Democratic ticket, which seems more nervous and inauthentic than joyful.